Motorola Announces “Project Ara” which will allow users to customize their Smartphones

Motorola has announced “Project Ara“, a free and open hardware platform for smartphones.

The purpose of Project Ara is to create a modular smartphone that would allow users to swap hardware components according their own wish.

Image Credit: motorola blog

Motorola says it wants to “do for hardware what the Android platform has done for software: create a vibrant third-party developer ecosystem, lower the barriers to entry, increase the pace of innovation, and substantially compress development timelines.”

And, it says,

Our goal is to drive a more thoughtful, expressive, and open relationship between users, developers, and their phones. To give you the power to decide what your phone does, how it looks, where and what it’s made of, how much it costs, and how long you’ll keep it.

The design for Project Ara consists of an endoskeleton (endo) and modules. The endo is the structural frame that holds all the modules in place. A module can be anything, from a new application processor to a new display or keyboard, an extra battery, a pulse oximeter–or something not yet thought of!

Motorola is wokring with Phonebloks, for developing Project Ara. Motorola allows people to sign up to be “Ara Scout” for giving feedback and share ideas about the design.

Watch the below video explaining Phonebloks concept which is the base for Motorola’s Project Ara which will be launched in one year.

Motorola’s this new initiative of “Project Ara” gets lot of positive responses from people. But few people raise many questions/negative responses too.

For example,

1. Will phone manufactures support this? Because it may not help them as allowing people to change the faulty components instead of replacing the whole device may reduce their sales.

2.Project Ara can not be implemented without making the smart phones Larger.

3.Dropping the phone may make the parts to separate.

4. The phone makers may hesitate to spend time/effort to innovate further from their side to make it successful as this is Open system. Already lot of mobile companies are actively fighting over patents related to mobile devices.